Southern Partisans

By: Gene Lyons

Does President Junior's repudiation of Sen. Trent Lott's clumsy nostalgia for racial segregation mean the end of the GOP's cynical "Southern Strategy?" It would be lovely to think so. It would also be romantic and unrealistic to imagine that Republicans mean to abandon completely the practice of sending encoded messages to bigots suggesting that the GOP is the White Man's Party.

The Lott episode suggests, however, that GOP doublespeak will have to become more subtle. The bamboozled Mississippi Senator got caught in a time warp. Maybe he hit the eggnog too hard at Strom Thurmond's birthday party. Bigotry has hardly vanished. But even in darkest Arkansas, you've got to go pretty deep into the backwoods to find a gathering where Lott's smugly patronizing views would be acceptable.

An act of historical imagination is required to understand how Gov. George Wallace could have won Arkansas' electoral votes in the 1968 presidential race. Colin Powell could win them today. The pronouncements of "Justice Jim" Johnson, Clinton-hater and former presiding genius of Arkansas' White Citizens Council, read like something from a museum exhibit. The "culture war" is over, and the bigots lost.

That said, it's also true, as Joseph Crespino recently wrote in the New York Times, that: "Historians can debate just how central Senator Lott's kind of doublespeak has been to Republican success in the South. They can also debate how central the South has been in the Republican Party's success nationally. But the fact that racial appeals have played a role in the success of the modern Republican Party is not under debate. It is irrefutable. As of today, it remains unacknowledged by the party as a whole."

Everything Lott said, he's said many times before. So have plenty of others since Richard Nixon got the nifty idea of capitalizing upon white resentment of the Civil Rights movement to win the South's electoral votes for the Republican party. The first recorded instance of Lott's saying the nation would have been better off had Strom Thurmond's segregationist "Dixiecrats" beaten President Truman in 1948 took place at a Ronald Reagan campaign rally.

Immediately after securing the 1980 Republican nomination, Reagan opened his campaign at a fair in Neshoba County, Mississippi, scene of the infamous 1964 murder of three civil rights workers - "outside agitators", people like Lott called them. Reagan's endorsement of "states rights" was all the more shameful, in my view, because privately he was almost certainly not a racist. He was motivated by sheer opportunism.

Lott's longtime affiliation with the Council of Conservative Citizens, a lineal descendant of the White Citizens Council, was given a thorough airing in the Washington Post in 1999. He was clearly lying then when he said he didn't know about its stridently segregationist views. His uncle was one of the CCC's grand poobahs. Back then, however, the vigilant Washington press was too preoccupied with Bill Clinton's sexual adventures to bother with anything so trivial as the Senate majority leader's buddying up to a bunch of segregationist sheetheads.

That said, I found myself feeling sorry for the poor fool listening to him beg forgiveness. For a Southern white man of a certain age - Lott's mother once wrote a liberal newspaper editor wishing him dead - dealing with these issues in public involves complicated feelings of anger, shame, sorrow, and resentment. Dr. King always counseled forgiveness, reaching out to the best in one's adversaries rather than humiliating them.

Forgiving and endorsing, however, aren't the same thing. It's understandable that when Lott reportedly sought public support from Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, he didn't get it. The florid condemnation of conservative pundits like Andrew Sullivan, however, who pronounced himself "still reeling from watching Trent Lott's bumptious, smug, self-congratulatory self-defense" strikes me as less than convincing. Where have these jokers been for, oh, the past 25 years or thereabouts?

Where were they when President Junior spoke at racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic Bob Jones University during the South Carolina primary? When he nominated as Attorney General John Ashcroft, who, like Lott, also has longstanding ties to the CCC and has given interviews to Southern Partisan magazine praising the patriotism and moral superiority of Jefferson Davis and other Confederate slaveholders?

Bush himself is clearly no racist, merely a cynic. It took Arkansas Republicans a quarter century after 1968 (Wallace won slightly more than a third of the vote) to grasp that overtly racist campaigns cannot win here. White House political guru Karl Rove is a quicker study. The Arkansas and Louisiana Senate races made it clear that Democrats can successfully appeal to white voters across the region. There are fewer white bigots and more minority voters every year. Crudely expressed views like Lott's are killing the GOP everywhere else, and becoming an unacceptable anachronism in the South too. For Junior to be re-elected, Lott has to go.